Meet The Hospitals Suing a Newspaper for a Story That Hasn't Been Printed Yet

The Boston Globe's Jenna Russell has been reporting and researching a story for 18 months about a man living with mental illness and his inability to receive proper care. One of those care providers is Steward Health Care Systems.

Steward, whose representatives have not been provided a draft of the story but have been informed of its nature, alleges that the Globe intends to publish "untrue" and potentially damaging claims the patient made about his treatment at Steward facilities, according to the complaint.

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Steward then sent a constable to the house of the subject of the story on Wednesday night to serve him legal papers, even though he is not being sued and his name will be withheld when the story is printed.

"Denied the opportunity to respond to these scurrilous allegations and to provide the Globe with all of the relevant facts, Steward is faced with the certain and immediate specter of an irreparably damaging, one-sided attack on its delivery of healthcare to its patients," the complaint says.

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Looks like that's already happened, folks! Remember, there's a soundtrack for lawsuits exactly like this one, and that soundtrack is Barbra Streisand.

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California inadvertently generated further publicity of it.

Yep, we just cited Wikipedia. We did not conduct an 18-month investigation. The Boston Globe did. Sing it, Babs.